Roy Rapoport manages the Insight Engineering group at Netflix, responsible for building Netflix's Operational Insight platforms, including cloud telemetry, alerting, and real-time analytics". He originally joined Netflix as part of its datacenter-based IT/Ops group, and prior to transferring over to Product Engineering, was managing Service Delivery for IT/Ops. He provided input into the forming of the Cloud Operations and Reliability Engineering (CORE) group at Netflix, and continues to play an advisory role to the group and its members. He also built the majority of the python infrastructure libraries to allow developers at Netflix access cloud systems.
Roy has been in tech for about 20 years with positions in IT engineering and operations, software development, and software quality engineering, but his passion remains with operations and automation.

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Talk: Netflix built its own monitoring system - and why you probably shouldn't

Location:

Duration: 8:30am -
9:50am

Developers face an ongoing tension with no one-size-fits-all solution between buying vs building products. For example, at Netflix we built our own monitoring system from scratch -- and you probably shouldn't. In many cases, this is a spectrum, rather than a binary decision, with engagements that span from customizing software, to building interfaces to it, and sometimes contributing back to open-source software. The factors contributing to a given decision are sometimes rational (e.g. degree of customization and environmental uniqueness) and sometimes decidedly not. We'll discuss a few occasions within Netflix where we had to make this choice and different approaches we took -- some of which worked well, and some ... less so. We'll lay out some of the pitfalls and opportunities so as to help others avoid our mistakes and make the right decisions for their own environments more consistently.